Strengthening Future UK Raw Material Criticality Assessments

Abstract

A criticality assessment is a means of prioritising policy attention between a set of raw materials. The ranking of materials often involves how likely disruptions are to a supply chain, and how impactful their consequences would be for a defined subject over a defined period. The UK’s current criticality assessment is a useful screening tool, but it cannot by itself identify defined disruption scenarios, estimate resulting losses, or show which intervention would reduce those losses most effectively. In the long run, the UK should move toward simulation-based criticality assessment. This approach is better suited to policy because it can represent explicit disruptions, trace their propagation through supply chains, and express consequences in decision-relevant units. That transition will take time. Existing simulation-based methods remain narrow in hazard coverage, demanding in data, and incomplete in several key respects. creening tools should therefore continue to be improved in parallel. This work also supports the longer-term transition to simulation-based assessment. Some of the same tasks, especially clearer hazard definition and stronger modelling of disruption likelihoods, are needed both to improve screening and to support later simulation. Predictive modelling of disruption likelihoods is the clearest bridge between the two approaches. Where defensible likelihood models can be built, they can strengthen screening tools now and later support simulation-based consequence analysis.